Private Investigator Admits to ‘Unlawful’ Acts in Prince Harry's Court Case
Claims emerge during Prince Harry’s phone-hacking lawsuit.
Trouble is brewing once again for Britain’s tabloid press, as long-simmering allegations of unlawful newsgathering have taken a different and more serious turn. This week, inside the High Court in the UK, a former private investigator described the kind of work he says helped fuel one of the country’s most powerful newspaper groups—and now sits at the centre of Prince Harry’s legal battle, of which he is one of seven high-profile claimants accusing ANL of "grave breaches of privacy" over a 20-year period.
Daniel Portley-Hanks, a US-based private detective, also known as 'Detective Danno,' told the court that much of his wealth came from work carried out for the publisher of the Daily Mail. Giving evidence in a case brought by Prince Harry and six other high-profile claimants, Portley-Hanks said he earned around $1 million working for the The Daily Mail, and Mail on Sunday, both owned by Associated Newspapers Ltd. (ANL), The Guardian reported.
Portley-Hanks said the money allowed him to buy a large house in California and accumulate savings of around $150,000, which he said came “almost entirely” from his work for the publisher. He told the court that his relationship with ANL ended after the 2012 Leveson inquiry into press standards, at which point he said he was informed he could continue working for the company only if he surrendered his private investigator’s licence. “I went bankrupt after they stopped using me,” Portley-Hanks told the court.
Now 79, Portley-Hanks was giving evidence in a lawsuit brought by seven claimants who allege that ANL used unlawful information-gathering techniques over several decades. Alongside Prince Harry, the claimants include Elton John and his husband David Furnish, actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost, former Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, and Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence. Portley-Hanks said he worked for the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday from the early 1990s until around 2013, describing himself as “the database guy.”
“All I needed was a name or a phone number, and I could find a target’s contact and other private details, usually within minutes,” he said. Interestingly, this is what Harry has accused the newspaper of. The lawsuit has accused ANL journalists of “hacking mobile phone voicemails, tapping landline calls and ‘blagging’ personal information” about subjects without their knowledge or consent. The prince, almost choked up, in his testimony, said British tabloids had made his wife's life 'an absolute misery.' It also emerged during court proceedings that William and Kate Middleton had been named as alleged targets of phone hacking.
While he told the court that he did not believe his actions were illegal at the time, Portley-Hanks said he now accepts that some of the work he carried out would be considered unlawful under UK law, including the improper gathering of personal data. That assertion was challenged by ANL’s legal team, who pointed to his earlier public statements in which he said he had not broken the law. ANL has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, describing the claims against it as “lurid” and “preposterous.”
